Professional Practice: Law in Qin and Han China

Discussion of the Zouyanshu, an early Han collection of legal cases; of the role of testimony as mediated evidence in early Chinese legal texts; and of the role of law in early China, especially in relation to ritual and religion

Caffeine taste signaling in drosophila larvae

The Drosophila larva has a simple peripheral nervous system with a comparably small number of sensory neurons located externally at the head or internally along the pharynx to assess its chemical environment. It is assumed that larval taste coding occurs mainly via external organs (the dorsal, terminal, and ventral organ). However, the contribution of the internal pharyngeal sensory organs has not been explored. Here we find that larvae require a single pharyngeal gustatory receptor neuron pair called D1, which is located in the dorsal pharyngeal sensilla, in order to avoid caffeine and to associate an odor with caffeine punishment. In contrast, caffeine-driven reduction in feeding in non-choice situations does not require D1. Hence, this work provides data on taste coding via different receptor neurons, depending on the behavioral context. Furthermore, we show that the larval pharyngeal system is involved in bitter tasting. Using ectopic expressions, we show that the caffeine receptor in neuron D1 requires the function of at least four receptor genes: the putative co-receptors Gr33a, Gr66a, the putative caffeine-specific receptor Gr93a, and yet unknown additional molecular component(s). This suggests that larval taste perception is more complex than previously assumed already at the sensory level. Taste information from different sensory organs located outside at the head or inside along the pharynx of the larva is assembled to trigger taste guided behaviors

Developmental roadmap for antimicrobial susceptibility testing systems

Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) technologies help to accelerate the initiation of targeted antimicrobial therapy for patients with infections and could potentially extend the lifespan of current narrow-spectrum antimicrobials. Although conceptually new and rapid AST technologies have been described, including new phenotyping methods, digital imaging and genomic approaches, there is no single major, or broadly accepted, technological breakthrough that leads the field of rapid AST platform development. This might be owing to several barriers that prevent the timely development and implementation of novel and rapid AST platforms in health-care settings. In this Consensus Statement, we explore such barriers, which include the utility of new methods, the complex process of validating new technology against reference methods beyond the proof-of-concept phase, the legal and regulatory landscapes, costs, the uptake of new tools, reagent stability, optimization of target product profiles, difficulties conducting clinical trials and issues relating to quality and quality control, and present possible solutions

Trace metal analysis in arctic aerosols by an inductively coupled plasma-time of flight-mass spectrometer combined with an inductively heated vaporizer

Two newly developed instruments were combined to analyze the trace metal content in size separated arctic aerosols during the measurement campaign ASTAR 2004 (Arctic Study of Tropospheric Aerosols, Clouds and Radiation 2004) at Spitsbergen in MayJune 2004. The aim of this extensive aerosol measurement campaign was to obtain a database for model-calculations of arctic aerosol, which play an important role in the global climate change. The ASTAR project was centered on two aircraft measurement campaigns, scheduled from 2004 to 2005, addressing both aerosol and cloud measurements, combined with ground-based and satellite observations. In the present paper one example for the analysis of ground-based aerosol particles is described. The sampling of aerosol particles was performed in a well-known manner by impaction of the particles on cleaned graphite targets. By means of a cascade impactor eight size classes between 0.35 and 16.6 μm aerodynamic diameters were separated. To analyze the metal content in the aerosol particles the targets were rapidly heated up to 2700 °C in an inductively heated vaporizer system (IHVS). An argon flow transports the vaporized sample material into the inductively coupled plasma (ICP) used as ionization source for the time of flight-mass spectrometer (TOF-MS). The simultaneous extraction of the ions from the plasma, as realized in the TOF instrument, allows to obtain the full mass spectrum of the sample during the vaporization pulse without any limitation in the number of elements detected. With optimized experimental parameters the element content in arctic aerosol particles was determined in a mass range between 7Li and 209Bi. Comparing the size distribution of the elemental content of the aerosol particles, two different meteorological situations were verified. For calibration acidified reference solutions were placed on the cleaned target inside the IHVS. The limits of detection (LOD) for the element mass on the target range between 2 and 200 pg for the elements studied, except Na, Mg, and Cr, which are influenced by high background